


these were days that belonged to the moon

by loamvessel



Category: Dead To Me (TV)
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:36:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24959254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loamvessel/pseuds/loamvessel
Summary: She knows Judy uses a vibrator, a small thing that fits in her hand and was made by “a female owned company.” She takes these bits of information into herself as though they’re entirely inconsequential to her, as though she hasn’t had more than one dream involving Judy, the vibrator, and herself, whose narratives seem more in line with pornography than any rational progression of events.
Relationships: Judy Hale/Jen Harding
Comments: 10
Kudos: 73





	these were days that belonged to the moon

I mean it, she says. You have seriously killer tits. You could get any guy in this bar, easy. 

Judy laughs and puts down her glass of wine, as though it’s all a very funny joke. A casual appraisal, the toothless intimacy between women. Who hadn’t kissed their friend at some frat party in their college days? Women were always disrobing, causally. They ask if they can borrow a tampon. They wear each other’s clothes. They carry this knowledge of each other’s bodies against their skin. Judy sleeps against her in the taxi. A faint film of sweat blooms in the places where their bodies touch, like a photograph, which exposes only the parts of the film that are reached by light. Maybe she wants to sleep with her, this woman who sleeps in her house but doesn’t. Together but separate, their bodies on parallel tracks. Judy is always telling her that she has a dancer’s body, that deep down her muscles carry an entire history. She says when she paints her hands move almost without her telling them to, having sketched so many times the contours of an eye or the tilt of a chin, knowing where each must be in relation to the other, the exact relationality of objects within space. If you go back to dance, she says, your body will remember, I promise. 

I want to remember your body, Jen thinks, the vulgar thoughts lucid as a potter’s wire. She knows so much about Judy’s body by virtue of that special female closeness. She doesn’t shave her pussy sometimes. Her breasts get tender. She reaches up to cup them, pressing the soft material of her striped shirt. She used to use a menstrual cup, back when she still menstruated. She uses a jade egg for “pelvic floor exercises” to improve her orgasm. In her less lucid moments, usually under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, Jen finds herself thinking of that small round stone, its pale hue the green of a Luna moth’s wing. The object had been inside of Judy. Memory of her body resided in its small, compact form. Fucking egg, Jen thinks. I’ll exercise her goddamn pelvic floor. It won’t even know what hit it. She knows Judy uses a vibrator, a small thing that fits in her hand and was made by “a female owned company.” She takes these bits of information into herself as though they’re entirely inconsequential to her, as though she hasn’t had more than one dream involving Judy, the vibrator, and herself, whose narratives seem more in line with pornography than any rational progression of events. 

They come together because one of the moms at Henry's school thinks they’re a lesbian couple. It makes Judy laugh. She laughs a little too much. She looks at Jen as though to say, that’s so crazy, right? a way that it’s obvious she really doesn’t think it would be that crazy at all. 

The kiss between them is slow and tentative. Two women. It’s nothing like kissing a man, nothing Jen would ever have imagined for herself until now, and isn’t it so funny that they’re both here, the two of them. It doesn’t feel funny to me, says Judy, in a quiet, earnest voice like a Labrador, and Jen stammers an apology in return. She’d forgotten that Judy was gay. Or something. They never really talked about that. 

She’d been so afraid of overstepping herself, of violating the sacred covenant of feminine intimacy, that she’s managed to blunt herself down to every want, every feeling. Even if Judy did like women, the possibility of Judy liking her was so absurd to her she had never even allowed herself to consider it. But now, with Judy’s mouth on hers, she lets herself feel the heat pooling in her lap, the small, steady ache. It’s been so long since she kissed someone in earnest, but her body remembers and is learning all at once. 

I have to go, Jen murmurs. She’s out of breath. She feels like she just drank a bottle of wine and stood up too fast, but in a good way. To work, she adds, unnecessarily. 

Yes, says Judy. Her chest is heaving, and her eyes are glazed in the way they get when she smokes weed. She reaches into the depths of her sleeve to locate a strap that has come loose and returns it to its rightful place on her shoulder, and Jen shivers, gives herself permission to be moved by it, this small gesture that hints at the existence of Judy’s body under her clothes. Work. Yes, I have that too, actually. Funny you should mention that. 

But I’ll see you tonight, Jen says. 

Okay, says Judy. And, um, all this— she gestured abstractedly to the space around her own body, and then to Jen. You know what I mean. This can get picked up where we left off. 

***

It rains that night, always a good sign in summer. She steps into the guesthouse like a bride across a threshold, her hair still damp with it. It feels as momentous. It is as momentous. 

She’s always found it strange that no one ever had anything partially poetic to say about brown eyes, when Judy’s reminds her of so much; coffee, dark liquor, deep earth. Tomorrow the soil will be the color of those eyes, a coincidence so ordinary and spectacular she feels she might be the main character in a novel, whose moods trigger sunsets and summon storms. 

She would be the first to admit she has no idea what she’s doing. It’s been a long time since she’s been this clueless during sex, and she wants to get angry so she won’t have to feel scared, but she promised Judy she won’t do that anymore. Judy calms her down. She’s good at that. She’s as good with middle aged women with anger issues as she is with the elderly. She takes Jen’s hand and shows her where to touch, and she feels it, the small firm button of flesh in the middle of all that slickness. 

Just touch me like you would with yourself, Judy says. I’ll tell you if you’re doing something wrong. Then she laughs. Come on, Jen. You can’t tell me you’ve never masturbated. I have a bad back, she protests, a little lamely. But there’s something indescribable about the feeling of Judy moving in her hands, her little sounds, her body the colour of sun ripened wheat, the broad, lithe runner’s body, the small muscles flickering in her arms, the little veins jumping in the backs of her hands. She smells like sweat in that new age way she’s always hated in a yoga studio which is why she never goes, that and she’s never understood all that zen new age bullshit—the smell of hot women with more body hair than sanctioned by the patriarchy, and less than functional deodorant. But now she finds it heady, earthy, even erotic, as it mixes with the mushroomy scent of arousal. The aftertaste of wine is beginning to go sour in both their mouths, but it’s far too late for either of them to care. Their bodies move together. She feels Judy’s nose pressed against her cheek, that vaguely birdlike nose that stands in contrast to her soft face, her soft manner, Judy’s mouth wet against her jaw. Judy’s whole body is expressive. It tightens and swells for her, the muscles moving on her smooth broad back. Judy pants and flushes and then comes, so loudly, as though she’s been split open. Jen feels the tension gathering in her body and then the arch, the sudden release, the sound and heat of Judy’s moans passing so close to her ear, and she feels it like an arrow’s path. 

***

Always in the guesthouse, never in the bed.

Never in front of the children, not even a kiss.

Judy comes. Jen doesn’t. 

No one ever speaks these rules out loud, but they both know them. She doesn’t know why neither of them ever talk about them when they’re so communicative during sex. She’s never had problems setting Judy straight before, and she doesn’t know what’s changed now. She only knows she hates the idea of labelling what they have, because she knows Judy will go, well, what exactly is this, anyways, and they’ll have to discuss it and then they’ll be together, dating, those strange words that are both too casual and not casual enough. And worse they’ll have to talk about themselves, and she’ll have to admit to herself the thing she’s known for a long time—that her deepest, most pressing connections are, and always have been, with women. There’s a word for women like that and she feels it, the faint pressure of it always in the black of her head. She can’t say it, even naked in the early hours of the morning with Judy moving like water in her hands. She won’t say it, so she doesn’t, and every night she creeps back to the house, and lies awake, every inch of her body open, lucid in the three AM dark, so aware of Judy’s body she almost feels it beside her in the bed. She dreams of Judy, long vivid dreams with no plot, just the kaleidoscope of her body, with its small marks and long planes. Tetris dreams. 

It had taken several meetings before she came. They always try, but she figures some mechanism must be broken in her. Years of stress, trauma, lovelessness, the assault in the green car, the sudden fear rising in her, the crunch of her fist connecting with his face and the hot blood smell. Definitely a boner killer. Judy tries anyways, a sweet look of determination on her face. Her body looks so young, broad and muscular, her soft stomach mostly unmarked by pregnancy. It makes her feel sad. Sometimes she imagines how it might feel to be in Judy’s body. She imagines it must feel so light. 

The more time she spent with Judy, the more she became aware, slowly, of a heaviness within herself, a shift in her center of gravity. She is walking differently, more slowly. For some reason, her legs feel anchored to the earth, as though they’re paperclips and someone’s moving a giant magnet under the crust of the earth. She’d done that as a girl under the table; whatever coins and safety pins floating around blithely over the varnished surface, but when you tried to lift them up in the air, you couldn’t pull them away. She knows she can’t pull her legs away anymore—she can only skate forlornly over her familiar paths, to work, to school, to the grocery store, and back home. When had that weight appeared in her? She was certain it hadn’t been there when she was a girl. It must have been building in her for years and years, so slowly she hasn’t noticed. Drops of water in a bucket. Like the Sicilians killed Minos. 

There are no rulebooks on lesbian relationships, at least not in popular culture, so there’s no one to tell her what to do when the body of your sexual partner makes you want to follow in your husbands footsteps and step out of a moving vehicle. She loves Judy, but loving Judy, undressing her, is an act of perpetual mourning. She touches Judy and Judy’s hands dig into her back. Her damp hair clings to her forehead. A woman in labour. Taking Judy’s breasts in her hands and then her mouth, feeling the nipple stiffen under her tongue, that dual barb of sadness and desire. She can’t pretend she’s never looked at Judy before, that her gaze has never settled appreciatively on her legs or her ass or her breasts. She had never set out with the intention to look, never felt, as so many men seemed to, that she had a right to Judy’s body, but there was pleasure in it all the same, and she felt a certain guilt knowing she looked at Judy that way when she herself couldn’t provide the same satisfaction to Judy.

Judy had begged her the first time they were together. Please, Jen, she’d said. I’ve wanted this for so long, I’ve dreamed about this so many times you have no idea— 

And yet she had never connected it to the idea that Judy wanted her, that the desire she felt for Judy might be the same thing that Judy felt for her. But one night she undresses and finds Judy’s eyes on her, her legs spread on the bed of the guesthouse, her mouth slightly open, smiling a little, and she’d looked down when she saw Jen had noticed, like she’d been caught. She’d touched her, and she’d been soaking wet, already slick when Jen’s fingers found her centre after just a few minutes together, and she’d blushed. After that she began to notice Judy’s eyes on her more. Her presence had a certain weight and she felt it, sliding over her body and settling on certain places, the admiration on her face when Jen comes back from a run, the quick dart of her eyes when Jen stretches up to twist a towel in her hair...

This whole time she had been watching Judy, Judy had been watching her back. A strange thought, but one that wraps itself around her, working its way into her subconscious like a splinter working its way into a foot. The hitch in Judy’s breath when she takes off her clothes. Judy holds her, she realizes, not just to hold onto her, to search out some brace or friction, but to touch her, to be close to her, to have Jen in her arms. In the dark she presses her lips to Jen’s neck and inhales the smell of her hair, an arm curving up to pull her closer in the dark. The first time Judy’s small, neat little tongue traces the long white scar on her breast she cries out, the sudden feeling in her almost painful. The place Ted hadn’t even wanted to look at, let alone touch, and certainly not like this. Never like this, the path of her tongue is as deliberate as ink, first licking, then kissing, then biting, tonguing the pucker of peach white skin as gently as if it were a mouth. The sensation is strange, noticeably dulled, more akin to a tongue against her stomach or neck, but this sudden, unexpected touch thrills her and makes her ache. For the first time, she realizes that Judy really does see her, and she always has, so she lets Judy press her back into the bed and open her body with touch. And when Judy slides her fingers inside, she can feel it, the difference. She knows she’s going to come and when she does they both laugh, too ecstatic to be relieved, because they both know what they’ve just experienced was far too groundbreaking to sit with any longer in silence. 

Judy comes to bed with her that night. They sleep huddled together, curled around each other, even in the heat, even though it is summer. The days pass in a flurry of delirium, work, sleep, and Judy, her hot little red mouth and her clever hands, so open and pliant for her, so generous and patient in return. In the space of a few days she’s had more orgasms than she had in the past year. No, make that two years. She re-enters herself slowly, surfacing into her skin like waves on a shoreline, advancing inch by hard won inch before gravity pulls them back into the sea. Judy fucks like she does everything else—not the most experienced or efficient, but with a barefaced sincerity she finds utterly charming, and for the first time since they’ve been together she gives into it entirely, feeling molten in those thin, silver ringed hands. Judy fucking her with one hand between her legs and a finger in her mouth so her cry won’t reach the boys in the rooms across the hall. Judy pressing a precise, delicate kiss between her legs, a gesture witnessed only by the moon. Judy’s breasts crushed against her chest, more like clouds than flesh as they push together in a frenzy that neither of them quite understand. Judy with one ear to her collarbone, listening for the sound of her heart. 

She knows they’ll have to tell the children sometime—knows they probably already know—and that their might be consequences, backlash from other parents, certainly some shit from Lorna, at least about the fact that Judy’s technically a criminal, and Charlie, well, she barely knows what goes on in Charlie’s head anymore. But for now it’s just her and Judy and a sliver of dawn sky, a red slice of light just visible outside the window. She realizes, suddenly, that she loves Judy—that she’s loved her for a very long time, ever since that first moment when Judy walked into her life and somehow understood her. She remembers it now, that initial shock of recognition, they had slid so easily into each other’s orbits like a train switching tracks. No matter how many times they fought or lied they always slid back together, their need for each other greater than their need for violence or truth. Now Judy sleeps curled into Jen’s body, an old tshirt like a blanket around her square, narrow shoulders. She smells like lush shampoo and sex, even now, the rich, heady musk still somehow on her hands, and her breathing is the low, even pattern of deep REM. 

With Ted she had never been sure. As many times as he said he loved her, she would always do something wrong, some small mistake or gesture to make him go cold. It had felt to her, especially as their marriage progressed, that Ted didn’t love her as much as he loved a placeholder of a woman, a blank space where someone told him a wife should be. It didn’t matter who she, Jen Harding, really was, which things she liked and which places she had been. He would have loved her in the exact same way, abstracted, never quite seeing her, his affection aimed not at her but at some space, an aura around her body, a pair of empty brackets with an unknown value inside. 

But she knows Judy loved her, because she never had to guess. The things Judy said and did were for her and her alone. Judy rolls a blunt for her on the beach. She makes breakfast for the kids. She gets angry about the things that Jen gets angry about, at least for the most part. And when she gets upset, that upsets Judy too. In the strangest, most ironic act of chance or fate, the woman who ruined her life was her perfect counterpart, the first adult on earth who had made her feel loved. 

How perfect, she thinks, how inevitable that the paths of their lives have led to this.


End file.
